Committee to Protect Journalists Releases 2014 Report

By Jonathan Rozen Reprint | | Print |

UNITED NATIONS, Feb 12 2014 (IPS) - The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) Wednesday released its 2014 report titled, “Attacks on the Press: Journalism on the World’s Front Lines”, an annual survey of the conditions of global press freedom.

At the U.N. headquarters in New York, Joel Simon, Executive Director of CPJ, explained the thematic ideas of the report, the status of global journalistic freedom and the importance of the U.N. in achieving greater global media freedom.

“The United Nations has a critical responsibility to ensure that the right to freedom of expression is respected in practice”, stated Simon, “the same rights people have off line, must be protected online.”

During his address, Simon identified — the defense of freedom of expression online, the fight against the impunity of those who target journalists and expansion of independent information — as the three main objectives the U.N. must pursue to support the protection of journalists and their work.

CPJ identifies the number of journalists killed and jailed as the primary indicators of global press freedom. In 2013, these numbers reached near record highs with 70 journalists killed and 211 imprisoned at the end of the year.

Simon also identified the role of technology in dramatically changing the world of both information and journalism.

“Not that long ago, the battleground for press freedom was confined within the borders of autocratic states…it was national governments, through censorship and violence, that set the boundaries for freedom of expression,” Simon explained.

“But technology has allowed the ideals represented by Article 19 [of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which states the right to freedom of opinion and expression] to actually be realized. Today, information has become a shared global resource and the engine of the global economy”

Russia and Turkey have been identified as the countries with the greatest degradation in media freedom over the last year, while Syria, Iran and Egypt topped the ranking for the most dangerous countries for journalists.

The last two years, 2012 and 2013, have been identified as the deadliest years for journalists ever documented by CPJ, since its founding in 1981. Two main factors are responsible for this decrease in media freedom. These are the severity of the violence in Syria and the use of “anti-terror” charges to detain or restrict journalistic activity, as recently seen in the arrest and imprisonment of Aljazeera English journalists in Egypt.